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The Bystander
Standing in the Grand-Place at night, I waited for something—anything—to break the near-perfect symmetry. Then he arrived. The man didn’t pose. He just paused in the middle of the cobbles, framed squarely between the elegant baroque façades and the soft reflection of lamplight on wet stone. His silhouette gave scale and narrative to the grandeur behind him. Alone but not lonely, motionless yet in transit—he became the photograph’s axis. I shot handheld at high ISO. Noise was a concern, but the Nikon sensor held up. I retained the grain because it added texture to the shadows without crushing the blacks. Technically, this is a symmetrical composition, but it’s also layered:…
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Fujifilm XF 100-400: a quick test
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A Couple of Windows
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Max Casacci – Live@Circolo Aternino, Pescara
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Alone
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Halt!
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Not A Rorschach Inkblot
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Servicing a Sig Sauer P226
This frame came together as a study of routine and tactility rather than drama. The hands, well-worn and pragmatic, are in mid-action—focused, unposed, doing what they’ve likely done a hundred times before. It’s not a glamour shot of a weapon. It’s a photograph of labour, care, and the quiet diligence of someone who knows their way around a mechanical system. The Sig Sauer P226, known for its precision and reliability, has always struck me as more tool than totem. That sense informed how I chose to shoot this: close, compressed, honest. I avoided depth-of-field tricks or shallow focus. The visual language here is functional, echoing the subject matter. The background…
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A Shooter
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Missed Airplane
I made this photograph on a foggy morning at the airport, when the air was so thick with mist that the horizon vanished entirely. The two stair trucks stood idle, angled towards each other as if in conversation, yet the absence of the plane they were meant to serve transformed the scene into something more ambiguous. What should have been a moment of transit became one of suspension. The composition leans heavily on geometry. The crosswalk in the foreground pulls the viewer in, its bold stripes leading the eye towards the vehicles in the middle distance. Beyond them, the frame dissolves into white haze, stripping the background of any detail.…
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Is Batman Coming To Town?
There are moments in photography when nature conspires to hand you a frame so surreal, you almost question its authenticity. This image is one of those moments — a shaft of blazing light erupting from the horizon, punching through the heavy grey sky like a celestial spotlight. The comic-book reference in the title is apt; it’s as if Gotham’s bat-signal has been reimagined over a Mediterranean fishing port. From a compositional standpoint, the photograph benefits from the strong vertical energy of the light beam, cutting cleanly through the otherwise horizontal layout of boats, masts, and buildings. The balance between the darkened marina in the foreground and the dramatic burst of…
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Sega Codemaster
There’s a certain kind of nostalgia that hums in the air around old arcade machines — the whirr of the fans, the dull thump of buttons, the phosphor glow of a screen just a little too close for comfort. This photograph leans into that, not by showing the player, but by staring straight down the throat of the beast itself. The composition is blunt and unapologetic: the steering wheel dead-centre, its SEGA logo and stylised crest almost daring you to sit down and prove yourself. Behind it, the game’s leaderboard spills out in garish blues, whites, and yellows, with Spa Francorchamps’ familiar curves just visible on the left. There’s a…
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The Quiet Riot
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Los Niños y El Tocaor
The guitarist was Pedro Navarro, and he played with the kind of intimate conviction that can silence a room without demanding it. I took the shot during a flamenco recital in a modest Spanish cultural venue, one of those places where chairs creak and plaster flakes off the walls, but the soul is palpable. What caught me wasn’t just the precision of his fingers on the strings, or the deliberate slowness of the opening compás—it was the quiet appearance of the two boys at the back. Dressed like miniature adults, suspended in a corridor of sound and formality, unsure whether to stay or move on. One places a hand on…
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Ramón Jarque, tocaor
I have always found that photographing musicians is less about the performance and more about the moments in between — the quiet exchanges between player and instrument. In this portrait of Ramón Jarque, I wanted to strip away the spectacle and capture him in a state of private dialogue with his guitar. The composition is simple, almost understated. I framed Ramón in profile, letting the lines of his arm and guitar neck lead the viewer’s eye diagonally across the image. The background, with its blurred wine bottles and textured wall, is just present enough to provide context without intruding on the intimacy of the moment. Depth of field is shallow,…
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Street Of New York… Possibly
The image was taken in Italy. But remove the signage, blur the language on the air conditioning units, and this could just as easily be Queens or Brooklyn — any back alley where heat pumps hum above cracked asphalt and fading stucco. That universality was the point. Place becomes anonymous when its elements are global. I composed it as a frame within a frame — the corridor of walls leading the eye to the vanishing point, while the pipes, units, and rust act as punctuation marks. The textures do the talking: peeling paint, patched cement, and the industrial clutter that cities never clean up because no one looks down these…
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The Flying Dutchman… a sort of
I made this shot standing at the edge of a small harbour after midnight, the kind of hour where everything becomes abstract unless it’s lit. The boat, isolated and slightly listing, sat in complete stillness, half-moored, half-abandoned. It wasn’t moving, but it didn’t feel settled either. That in-betweenness is what caught my attention. The frame leaned heavily on underexposure—on purpose. I wanted the boat to emerge from the blackness like a memory, not an object. I metered for the faintest highlights and let the rest fall into noise and void. What the image lacks in tonal range, it gains in atmosphere. The blacks are thick, the shadows granular, and the…
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Spectrum
A broken LCD panel, screen blacked out except for vertical bands of coloured light, frozen mid-collapse. I framed the shot in total darkness, using a tripod, low ISO, and long exposure to extract every nuance of the emitted RGB shards. The left stack is dominant—dense, pulsing, lines tightly packed, terminating in a soft arc of failure. The right set echoes it with less mass, more space between columns. Between them, void. The black isn’t absence—it’s the backdrop of digital death. This isn’t a glitch aesthetic. It’s material damage, turned into colour structure. Technically, I shot at ISO 100, f/5.6, 2.5 seconds. Manual focus. White balance locked to daylight to prevent…
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The Temple of Justice
From an elevated perspective, the grand staircase of the Italian Court of Cassation descends in perfect symmetry. Framed by neoclassical columns and lit by reverent lamplight, this space does not merely lead—it ascends, conceptually, toward the divine. The title, The Temple of Justice, is not metaphorical hyperbole, but a statement of function and form. This is not a courthouse. It is a sanctuary. Justice, as the image suggests, is not a secular procedure. It is a liturgy. It unfolds with rituals, vestments, invocation of higher powers, and the solemnity of faith. The robes, the benches, the altars of the law—these mimic the language of churches. And the Court of Cassation, the…
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Kite Surfing, Again
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Waiting for (Supreme) Justice
I took this while waiting, quietly, in Rome’s Corte di Cassazione—a place where silence isn’t just expected, it’s structural. Every arch, bench, and cornice feels designed to mute the outside world. What struck me wasn’t the grandeur (although the sculptural work is unapologetically ornate), but the emptiness. For all the architectural posturing, justice here is often a matter of waiting. The benches, scuffed and rigid, are the only human-scale elements in the frame. They sit below a frieze of muscular allegories and baroque pomp, a reminder of the institutional weight bearing down on the people beneath. The image is composed to reflect this—foreground arch framing the frieze, a horizontal band…
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Ashtray
The scene was quiet, almost too still for such a monumental location. From the balcony of the Court of Cassation, Rome’s ornate facade stretched before me, its stonework carved with faces that have watched over decades of political and judicial tides. And yet, in the foreground, resting on a cracked, timeworn surface, sat a simple glass ashtray. The juxtaposition was almost absurd—this object of everyday habit placed against the backdrop of one of Italy’s most imposing institutions. Framing the shot, I wanted to preserve that contrast. The ashtray dominates the foreground, crisp in focus, while the grand entrance behind it softens into blur. This use of shallow depth of field…
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The Watchdogs
High on a crumbling brick wall, two cats hold their ground. One, a tabby, sits upright, eyes locked on the camera with the unwavering stare of an appointed sentinel. The other, black and white, looks away, uninterested in the act of vigilance, its attention claimed by something out of frame. Behind them, the backdrop tells another story: a weathered industrial wall, its whitewash worn thin, the rusted blades of an old ventilation fan frozen in their casing. Wires run haphazardly across the façade, relics of a building that has seen better days. It’s an unlikely setting for such a scene, yet the pairing of living presence and decaying architecture feels…
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The Relentless Lawyer
Standing in Court, no matter what! Some portraits are taken in the studio, with light sculpted and poses rehearsed. Others, like this one, are captured in the quiet fissures of reality—moments where the weight of a life’s work shows itself unprompted. The old lawyer’s face carries the texture of decades in courtrooms, each wrinkle etched by cross-examinations, verdicts, and long nights parsing the fine print of justice. His robe hangs loosely now, a little heavier than before, as though the fabric has absorbed the gravity of the battles fought. The light, cool and unforgiving, falls across his profile, illuminating both the weariness and the fire that coexist in his expression.…
